WEBVTT

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The last of these
metrical poems I'll read

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is a poem called Looks.

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I was looking through
a book of photographs

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by a photographer called
Robert Mapplethorpe--

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came out last fall, I
think, and it's entirely

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a book of portraits--

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and came across the portrait
of somebody I had known.

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And not somebody I'd liked very
much, but somebody I'd known,

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who lived in the same house as
a friend of mine and somebody

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who lived in the same district
as me and I'd seen quite a bit

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over a number of years.

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Not a particularly
pleasant person,

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but a person who had the
most extraordinary eyes,

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you'd notice them at once.

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This is not like
Isherwood's eyes,

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there was a kind
of glow about him.

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He was highly conscious
of this, he was an actor,

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I'm sure he used it.

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He was-- he was-- he knew
that this was a gift,

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I called this a
gift in the poem.

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But there's an
extraordinary glow

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about these eyes, which
you notice in this poem.

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This poem came out
of remembering this.

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And I suppose I'm
using the word "looks"

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in the title in a
punning sense, both

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looks that you give somebody
else and looks in the sense

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that this is your appearance.

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I don't like his
looks, you might say.

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Those eyes appear to transmit
energy and hold it back,

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undissipated, too.

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His gaze is like a
star that cannot see,

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a glow so steady
he directs at you,

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you try to be the
first to look aside,

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less flattered by the appearance
of attention than vexed

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by the dim stirrings thus
implied within a mind kept

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largely in suspension.

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Although, a gaze sought
out and highly placed

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by lovers and photographers,
it is too patly overwhelming

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for your taste.

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You step back from such
mannered solemnities

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to focus on his no doubt sinewy
power, his restless movements,

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and his bony cheek.

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You've seen him, in the
space of one half hour,

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cross a street 20 times.

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You've heard him
speak, reading his work

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to the surprise
of guests who find

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that dinner was a stratagem.

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Poems, in which the
attracted turned to pests

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if they touch him
before he touches

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them, in which the celebrant
of an appetite richly fulfilled

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will say, "get off
me, bitch" to one

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who thought she had an
equal right to her desires.

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Nevertheless, in
which he holds you

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by the voice of
his demands, which

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take unfaltering body on the
air as need itself, live,

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famished, clenched like
hands, pale at the knuckle.

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Then, his luminous
stare, that too.

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He is an actor, after all.

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And it's a genuine
talent he engages

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in playing this one character.

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Mean, small, but driven
like Othello by his rages,

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as if a passion for no
matter what, even the self,

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is fully justified.

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Or as if anger could
repopulate the bony city

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he is trapped inside.

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At times, he has a lover he
can hurt by bringing home

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the pickups he despises because
they let him pick them up.

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Alert always to looks, and
they must look like prizes,

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he blurs further distinction,
for he knows nothing

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of strength but its apparent
drift, tending and tending,

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and nothing of repose, except
within his kindled gaze,

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his gift.

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